Suicidal Ideation
by gloryblastit
Summary: This is "Maybe a Dream", I just never liked that title and it's still about suicide, so R & R.


I talk to no one. I notice no one. I've fallen so far inside of myself that I can no longer tell who I am. It seems that sometimes there are two of me. One who does things and one who disapproves. Which one am I now?  
But there began to be a glimmer of hope. Glimmer. A crack in the pavement of my tasteless sucking black existence. It began to seem to the me who does things and the me who disapproves that if I feel dead and empty only being dead can fix it.  
It began to seem like a puzzle, like a looking backwards through a mirror. I felt so cold so maybe all the blood in my body could wrap itself around me and keep me warm.  
So shut off from everyone the only way to reach myself was to free my mind from the confines of my brain, to free my sight from the confines of my closed eyes.  
A gun could do it efficiently. More men use guns for this than women but the truly suicidal know nothing of statistics. The weight of the gun comforts the hand.  
So I got one and took it into my living room. I shut off all the lights and only the strange glow of the street light picked up the white line down the barrel of my gun.  
I layed down on my floor next to the gun and closed my eyes. It was then I had a vision? It wasn't a dream. I was as awake as I am now.  
A book I had fixated on as a child was The Outsiders, the S.E. Hinton classic book. The reason I fixated on it was Johnny. I loved Johnny. No matter that he wasn't REAL, that hardly figured into anything.  
With the gun by my side the living room slipped away and Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1966, took it's place.  
It was a vacant lot, a chain link fence, the thick smog of the 60s before all the clean air acts and filters and what not. Litter, too. There were no fines. Cigarette butts and coke bottles and bottle caps and wrappers and bits of metal littered the scrub grass and dirt of the vacant lot.  
At the far end by the fence I saw someone. A teenager with black greasy hair and a jean jacket, skinny and scared looking. He smoked, cupping his hand to light his cigarette against the wind.  
I wasn't born in 1966 but I felt at home here, like I knew this world better than 2004.  
I walked towards him and he heard my footsteps, looked over. It WAS Johnny, he had the big black eyes and the scar on his cheek, the collar of the jean jacket was flipped up because it was cool. His black hair curled behind his ears and touched the collar of the jacket.  
I was so glad to see him, near tears to see him. Johnny. I'd known him for years, it felt like. At 10 I'd read that book over and over, crying when he died and told Ponyboy to "stay gold" and then flipping to the front and there he was again, asking Dallas what the movie was.  
Johnny knew what it was to die.  
"Johnny," I said when I reached him. I couldn't believe how real it seemed, the Oklahoma sky I'd always imagined as a child, faded blue with wisps of smog. The smog turned the sunsets and the clouds those crazy colors.  
And Johnny himself, as real as anyone, as Shane, as Ryan, as myself. I saw his fingernails, every one bitten to the quick. I could see the faded threads of his jean jacket, the way his hair obscured one eye and he looked at me with the other. He didn't look particularly surprised to see me and greeted me casually enough, "Hey,".  
I felt like I could relax for the first time in years. I knew he accepted me, I could feel it. He would not be like Shane and ignore me as I tried to remember who I was. He wouldn't choose drugs over a relationship like Ryan. Not Johnny. Because Johnny was perfect. And noble. And...  
"Johnny," I sobbed, grabbing the chain link fence. It shook and made that metal clink chain link fences make. It was cold.  
"I just don't know what to do anymore," I said, scanning the sky, watching for the sunset.  
"Don't worry about it," he said, his words slow and twisted with the Oklahoma accent.  
"It'll work out," he said, and shook his hair out of his eyes. He looked at me with his wide, ernest eyes and I believed him. Nothing had worked out for me since I was 10 but I believed him. Johnny had never lied to me. I smiled a little through my tears and he smiled, too.  
It was comforting to stand near the fence in the vacant lot with Johnny, the weather cool, the sun starting to set. I could say anything to him and he wouldn't judge, not like Shane with his fake religious feeling and his soiled piouty. What the hell did Shane know? Johnny ran into that church and saved those kids and then he died for that. That's pious. Fuck Shane. Breaking the bridge. Johnny knew you didn't desert your friends, your buddies. Johnny knew a hell of a lot more than Shane.  
"Shane..." I began, finding it hard to put into words. The way I thought , I mean I believed I'd marry Shane. I thought of the way Shane had plucked away at me, like a dirty beaked vulture pulling veins and sinews and flesh from the corpse.  
But Johnny understood and regarded me with his kind eyes.  
"Forget him. He's not a problem now," And for once, for the first time in all the years since I'd fallen into my obsession with Shane it dissolved. Johnny spoke the truth. He wasn't a problem. I looked at him in amazement. He shrugged modestly, flipped his hair back again, kicked a little stone.  
"And Ryan, he..." I thought Ryan would fill the void left by Shane. I thought he loved me, too. It was so easy for him to leave.  
"Just forget about them, "Johnny said, looking into my eyes. His eyes had seen the other side of things. Johnny had been through the fire.  
"See, " he said, "They can't fill that void. They can't but you can," His voice was soft, kind of gruff.  
"Thanks, Johnny," I felt lighter. I thought it would be o.k. to go.  
"I've got to go now," I said. He smiled a bit sadly and nodded.  
"Alright. I'll be here,"  
He was so young, 16. But it was strange because while he was younger he was also older, because I wasn't even born in 1966 when he was 16.  
I left and he stayed, smoking, kicking at the ground.  
I came to on the living room floor. The gun lay beside me. "Put it away," Johnny whispered over the vastness of space and time and fiction and death, clear as a bell in my ear.  
I put it away in my drawer. Johnny saved me just like he saved those kids. 


End file.
